It was 1996 and Helen McCabe was the chief political reporter for Seven Network’s news.

But at just 26, standing in the Canberra bureau holding a sheet of paper, she found herself out of a job. In no uncertain terms she was told, in writing, that her contract wouldn’t be renewed and she was to leave the office by day’s end. High-profile television host Stan Grant would replace her.

“I was sacked by fax,” McCabe says, with a smile, in her office at ACP Magazines’ Park Street headquarters in Sydney.

“I had a career crisis at 26 and came back as a print journo.”

Now the editor-in-chief of the country’s most-read magazine, The Australian Women’s Weekly, McCabe can afford to smile.

At 43, fax-gate barely rates a mention in a career that has spanned some of the most coveted positions in the local media industry.

From Canberra, McCabe went on to become News Ltd’s European correspondent, night editor at The Australian and then deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

Just as she was contemplating her next move, former ACP boss Ian Law came along with an unexpected offer. He wanted to revamp the company’s flagship masthead, with more emphasis on news and current affairs, and thought McCabe was the best person for the job.

McCabe was flattered. After all, the Weekly reaches more than 2.3 million readers every month. But she admits being reluctant at first.

“At the time I had some concerns,” she says. “I was very comfortable at News Ltd and I had a very hard-core newspaper sensibility before I got here. I love the cut and thrust of general news.”

McCabe wasn’t sure whether she wanted to deal with the inevitable questions which would arise at planning meetings for the monthly women’s magazine.

“Is she pregnant? Has she had a baby? What about the wedding dress photo? To have those conversations over and over again, I thought I might find that really restricting,” she says.

“In truth, I’ve grown into it and come to understand what women are interested in and feel quite passionate about providing the stories that women want to read.” She has even come around to the royal family, helped along by the best sales figures in five years for the Weekly’s royal wedding issue last year.

“I read a whole story the other day about what the Queen keeps in her handbag,” she says sheepishly.

“I am probably not a monarchist but I have softened on this. I’m not sure if it’s because I get really great sales figures or I’ve just read a lot more about them.”

Late last year, amid whisperings that McCabe was being considered for roles on 60 Minutes and talkback radio, she re-signed with the Weekly for another two years. David Gyngell, chief executive of ACP’s parent, Nine Entertainment Co, personally handled the negotiations to make sure she stayed on board.

Gyngell told her over a long lunch that she couldn’t put her stamp on the magazine in just two years. The pep talk worked. “I said that she would not get the credit she deserved if she just did two years,” says Gyngell.

“It’s only 24 issues and I think many of the good things she has done will show in the next two years.

“She was one of the best journalists in Australia and she’s also one of the best editors. We are lucky to have her.”

McCabe chose to extend her contract at a challenging time for magazines. Advertising revenue across the industry shrank last year to an estimated $600 million from $750 million in 2008. Media agency OMD expects it to drop another 2 per cent in 2012.

But the Weekly has been relatively resilient. While it sold an average of just over 470,000 copies per month in the December quarter, a drop of 3.3 per cent, the number of people reading the magazine in the 12 months ended September 30 (the most recent available data) jumped about 6 per cent to 2.3 million.

“There’s more to do,” she says. “This is a great masthead. It has enormous potential across multiple platforms. Our social media program has to be seriously looked at. Over-40 women are big players on the Facebook stage and we haven’t really paid that a lot of attention. I think we need to bed down a stronger local news and current affairs approach.”

One of McCabe’s challenges is to boost ad revenue, which slumped 10 per cent to $37.2 million in the year ended November 30, according to Nielsen.

“In troubled markets and challenging times, advertisers and consumers flock to what they know,” says Mediabrands executive chairman Henry Tajer. “The Weekly is still a very dominant magazine within a heavily populated sector.”

McCabe, a self-professed political junkie, has certainly made her mark on the magazine.

Both Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Queensland Premier Anna Bligh have been on the cover. There have been news features on Liberal MP Malcolm Turnbull and Opposition Leader Tony Abbott (which she wrote herself). The very first issue under her editorship included a story and makeover of former federal Labor MP Belinda Neal after her husband, former NSW state minister John Della Bosca, admitted to having an affair.

The current issue is “almost the perfect balance” of stories, according to McCabe. Along with a cover story on Oscar hopeful Meryl Streep, there is a profile of iron ore billionaire and aspiring media mogul Gina Rinehart and an extract from the new book about US First Lady Michelle Obama. And, of course, pictures of Australian Football League star Shane Crawford’s new twin boys.

“You can’t get better than that,” McCabe says. “It was a strong issue. It’s still on the stands but the early indications are that it’s selling well. Having a strong news flavour to the stories is very important to me.”

Simon Davies, head of print at OMD, says McCabe has made the magazine “very contemporary”.

“She has taken some chances with covers and stories and introduced a more modern way of storytelling to the magazine,” he says.

McCabe has some experience at being in charge as she is the older sister to three brothers. Growing up on a farm in Hamley Bridge, a small town of about 600 people in South Australia, far from the nation’s capital, she was surprisingly surrounded by politics. Her father would have copies of Hansard, the official record of Parliament, delivered to the farm. She still watches question time religiously and her bookshelves are filled with political biography from Bob Hawke to George Bush.

After finishing a journalism degree in Adelaide, McCabe went to work at an FM radio station and moved to Seven after just three months. The network transferred her to Canberra, where she formed strong friendships with a group of up-and-comers in the media world, including ABC commentator Annabel Crabb, David Penberthy, who would go on to be editor at The Daily Telegraph, and Neil Breen, current editor of The Sunday Telegraph.

Years later, Breen poached McCabe from The Australian to work as his deputy. She is also godmother to his daughter Matilda.

“Her strength was news and she was heavily involved in everything political,” Breen says. “Every single week she wanted to nail a big story.”

Crabb remembers receiving a phone call from McCabe in her second week at the Weekly.

“I think she was locked in a cupboard somewhere and she rang to tell me there was someone in her office demonstrating a vibrating mascara,” she says.

“Her greatest strength is that she is profoundly unflappable. The fact that she moved from a big tabloid newspaper to the hugely different world of magazines speaks eloquently of her sense of adventure and confidence in her own ability.”

McCabe says one of the toughest times of her career was handling, alongside Breen, the fallout from an editorial decision to publish nude photographs that were wrongly claimed to be Pauline Hanson in The Sunday Telegraph in March 2009.

“There were so many things we learnt out of that,” she says. “It was the perfect storm. A lot of things went incredibly wrong. It wasn’t one thing.”

McCabe has dealt with some less dramatic controversies during her time at the Weekly.

She has been accused of political bias and airbrushing photos to hide wrinkles and cellulite. The decision to run a 13-page spread on Julia Gillard, including glamorised photographs, during an election campaign was criticised by commentators and the magazine’s conservative readers. But McCabe remains unapologetic.

“She was the first female prime minister in Australian history. That’s a cover,” she says.

“Equally I got a lot of criticism for the Abbott piece for doing the beautiful pictures of his girls as if that was somehow playing into his hands. There is some criticism that I have taken a political stance, but I can safely say there has been balance.”

If anything, McCabe is trying to curb her political interests.

“This is a very big, mass-market magazine. They really don’t want to read anything political. They spit the word out in focus groups,” she says. “The stories I do have to be carefully chosen and written.”

Despite the focus groups, McCabe has a few ideas for the lead-up to next year’s election.

“We’re going into a turbulent political time and this is the leading magazine for women, so we should be looking at the political landscape. It’s a case of how do we do it in a way that engages the reader.”

McCabe hasn’t shied away from business leaders either, introducing a “women of influence” list which has included Westpac boss Gail Kelly and Reserve Bank board member Heather Ridout. She also floated the idea of a profile of Seven boss David Leckie last year but he pulled out of the photo shoot, making it a difficult sell for a glossy magazine.

McCabe is realistic about the outlook for magazines.

“The second half of last year got very tough,” she says.

“The retail industry collapsed and we are a discretionary buy, so it’s not like turning on a television channel and watching Two and a Half Men. You have to go out and buy it. Women stopped spending. They suddenly decided they needed to put away some spare cash for a rainy day. So we did suffer.

“The circulation – they’re small drops, but I’m not naive about where it’s headed, particularly when you see our website grow by 40 per cent last year. I can see that the structural change is happening.”

The Weekly has an iPad application but take-up has not been spectacular, given older women aren’t typically early users of technology but tend to jump on board once it is established.

So far, “it’s not proven to be the instant saviour to the magazine industry”, McCabe says. “I think we’ll see it work over a longer period.”